By Alex Ramon. That’s why it’s a masterpiece – it escapes one interpretation. So I decided to accept the fact that this is my interpretation of the novel and hoped that it would touch other people too. Compared to other adaptations I’ve made of more ‘minor’ or lesser known works, […]
Now a Believer: Caroline Golum’s Revelations of Divine Love
By William Blick. Made for about $200,000 through crowdfunding via way of Brooklyn, Revelations achieves the scope necessary for a fascinating, faithful telling of the spiritual and historic journey of Julian of Norwich.” Different stories of religious faith and suffering have manifested themselves in one way or another in cinema […]
Reclaiming Cinema History: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas on 1000 Women in Horror (Shudder)
By Ellie Dean. We have very clear socially constructed, stereotypical ideas of what girlhood means, what femme adolescence means, what motherhood means, etcetera, and horror works so well as a forum to explore and deconstruct these cliches because it defamiliarizes them, makes them strange, and at its best transgresses and […]
Global Migration through State Corruption: Nathaniel Lezra on Roads of Fire
By M. Sellers Johnson. What I’m hoping to do with this documentary is present a relatively coherent blueprint for what other people go through. The first step to any sort of material change is how we see and talk to each other. To reminds us, that we are all human […]
Satyajit Ray’s Rich Humanist Comedy Restored: Days and Nights in the Forest (1970)
By Nathaniel Bell. One of the most elusive major works by a celebrated film artist has been restored in 4K….” Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest (original Bengali title: Aranyer Din Ratri) was, until now, one of the most elusive major works by a celebrated film artist. Its […]
Power of Solitude: Chen Deming on Always (Cong Lai)
By Yun-hua Chen. The film records the solitude of childhood and shows the power of poetry within that solitude.” Black and white, left-behind children, rural China – Director Chen Deming, in Always, uses a familiar formula to bring out a unique layer of poetry and coming-of-age. The Chinese title, Cong […]
A Clarifying Distance: Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown, Global Art Cinema, and the European Union
By James Morrison. My films are meant as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel-down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance instead of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead […]
Dead Souls on the U.S. Border: On Alex Cox’s “Final Film”
By Jenny Paola Ortega Castillo. Alex Cox, in what may be his final film, smartly reconfigures the classic theme of bureaucratic greed in Tsarist Russia into a bold, timely political Western situated in the borderlands of the 19th-century American West.” Alex Cox’s newest release Dead Souls (2025), stands as a […]
Questioning Authority: Jim Towns’ Mercy
By William Blick. Towns’ is unafraid to ask hard questions about education, religion, morality, censorship, gender bias, and civil rights. He does so in the format of a dystopic, sci-fiction vehicle in 90 minutes on a limited budget, with limited actors, to impressive results….” Jim Towns’ new film, Mercy is […]
Signs of the End Times – Saluting the Blood of Heroes: Behind the Apocalyptic Film
By Andrew Kolarik. Danny Stewart’s Saluting the Blood of Heroes: Behind the Apocalyptic Film could not be more timely. The opening sections of the book, which dive into the background of the apocalyptic film, are rather alarming in the way that they highlight the many colourful ways in which humanity […]